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Gore vidal lincoln review6/4/2023 ![]() ![]() Kurt Vonnegut, a house guest, had disappeared: his photographer wife, Jill Krementz, couldn’t find him anywhere on the eight acres of the Vidal estate. ![]() Sunshine, cypresses, cicadas, scented air, the physical drama: all the sense-heightening Mediterranean stuff. Neither Vidal nor Howard Auster, his long-standing companion, swam in the pool, which was even more impressively blue than the sea at the foot of the cliff. The host reclined on a beach chair under an umbrella dressed in a faded denim shirt and a pair of ancient, stained trousers, his white hair immaculately whipped above a face somewhat hidden by a pair of huge Imelda Marcos dark glasses – this combination of tremendous care and inattention the style of a Sicilian mafioso, his patrician composure suggestive of Burt Lancaster playing Lampedusa’s Leopard. If you don’t like houses perched on cliffs, then the blinding absence of a horizon at noon on a summer’s day and the steep plunge to the road below are unnerving.īefore lunch there was swimming, and the vague sense of being sized up. It is a beautiful place, if you like houses perched on cliffs, with an epic view of the Tyrrhenian Sea (somewhere in the hazy distance south of Salerno are the remains of the Greek settlement at Paestum). That house (since abandoned) and that sort of occasion have been written about so often by Vidal’s guests and interviewers, and by Vidal himself, that there is little to say that hasn’t been said. A decade ago, I went to lunch with Gore Vidal at his house in Ravello. ![]()
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